jlm-blog
~jlm

25-Oct-2014

Insects, emerge!

Filed under: animals — jlm @ 14:52

Today the nests of some kind of insect decided to emerge from under the ground of my yard and fly off.
[Pics! Vids!]

There were three nests doing this that I saw. About 40 seconds into the filming of the earliest two nests (one of which was already mostly done), Android’s camera app wedged and prevented taking photos or a new video (and even left the first 40s of that first video unviewable), and by the time my phone rebooted, there were only a few stragglers to photo. Later nest #3 emerged, and I got a couple decent vids of it.

21-Sep-2012

Pre-desecrated ikons

Filed under: animals — jlm @ 12:10

A distressing report from National Geographic: Elephant poaching for ivory is growing alarmingly, devastating elephant populations, and the demand for elephant ivory is for making holy objects. I don’t understand this at all. How can anything made from the illegal killing of an African elephant for its tusks’ ivory be holy? How is that poaching for making ikons not sacrilege to Christians and Buddhists? How can the buyers worship using an ikon made from such desecration?

6-Apr-2011

Peahens on my roof

Filed under: animals, so. cal — jlm @ 20:28

This dusk, some of the Pasadena peahens decided to go scampering around above my and my neighbors’ ceilings. They’re pretty large birds, so I could hear them up there clearly!
[Peahen on neighbor's roof]

13-Mar-2010

Urban peafowl sighting

Filed under: animals, biking, so. cal — jlm @ 13:11

I was just biking along Hill, by the PCC lots, and there braving traffic was a peacock and peahen. Bright blue necks, long (furled) train on the cock, quite the surprising sight, traffic stopped for the spectacle of them crossing the street.

4-Jul-2005

Arachnophilia

Filed under: animals, biking — jlm @ 10:19

So, there’s been this spider hanging around lately. On Thursday, it made a web across the pathway leading to the storage room. The building is to the south, so the path is usually shadowed, making the web nigh invisible. I stopped just before it when I saw this spider levitating at forehead height. I found the anchor lines of the web and cut a couple, sending the spider and web into the bushes, and went on to fetch my bike.

Next day, the spider had reconstructed its web, but this time I walked right through it. As I was brushing the silk off of me, I caught the spider’s dragline and pulled it from where it’d been hiding by the tree onto my head. Some more brushing, and I got it onto the ground and it crawled away, and I got my bike.

On Saturday, it’d made its web in front of my door. This didn’t last long, and soon it was crawling away along the wall. Yesterday it’d gotten into the storage room, and was using my bike as a web anchor. It must be getting pretty tired of me destroying its webs. Let’s see what it spins today…

Powered by WordPress